Mother Night Literary Elements

A novel

This story tells us about Howard W. Campbell Jr., one of the most notorious and vicious writers and broadcasters of Nazi propaganda to the English-speaking world, a gifted dramatist and even a better spy. The events take place in the USA (mostly New York), Berlin and Jerusalem. Time period is from 1912, the year Campbell is born, till 1961, the year when he decides to hang himself. Howard W. Campbell Jr. waits for the beginning of his trial in a jail in Jerusalem and writes the book about his life for Mr. Tuvia Friedmann, Director of the Haifa Institute for the Documentation of War Criminals, and for those who are interested in his story.

The story is told from the first point of view with Howard W. Campbell Jr. as a narrator.

Tone is rather melancholy, while mood is mostly apathetic, sad and contemplative.

Howard W. Campbell Jr. is both a protagonist and an antagonist. Although he serves as a spy in order to help the rest of the world to destroy Nazism, he does his job as the propagandist too well. However, Campbell’s friend, Kraft-Potapov, is also the antagonist, for he manages to do both vow to be Campbell’s friend forever and plot to betray him.

The major conflict is man vs. self. It is not only about Howard W. Campbell Jr. but other veterans. The question is this: how can he continue to live a normal life after the horrors he saw and did during the war? This is the major conflict.

There are two. The first one happen when Resi Noth commits suicide and the second one happens when Campbell receives a letter which he can use for his defense during the trial. However, instead of using it for his sake, Campbell prefers to kill himself.

Campbell writes, “I am behind bars in a nice new jail in old Jerusalem” in the very beginning of the novel and this sentence foreshadows the events. It becomes clear that this novel is going to be a confession of a war criminal.

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The novel is full of historical allusions. For instance, Campbell mentions such names as Adolf Hitler, Stalin, Paul Joseph Goebbels, Adolf Eichmann and Rudolf Franz Hoess. He addresses this story to Mr. Tuvia Friedmann, the Director of the Haifa Institute. Campbell mentions such literary works as the Book of Revelation and a poem by William Blake “The Question Answered”. He also writes about Auschwitz and the Tier garden in Berlin.

Kurt Vonnegut uses imagery in order to help readers to understand, what the protagonist really feels and thinks.

In his tender care, literally millions of Jews were gassed.
Tender care and gassing in the same sentence create paradox.

Everybody was saying the same things over and over and over in those days.
Repetition of the word over creates parallelism.

Everything was gone but the cellars where 135, 000 Hansels and Gretels had been baked like gingerbread men. (The Introduction to the novel written by Kurt Vonnegut)
Hansels and Gretels are a metonymy, which stands for German children both male and female killed during bombing of Dresden.
And that usefulness was what saved my neck.
A neck is a synecdoche, in which a part represents the whole.

We heard the bombs walking. (The Introduction to the novel written by Kurt Vonnegut)